Clare O’Farrell, Foucault’s thought (2013)

Clare O’Farrell, Foucault’s Thought, In Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences. Edited by Byron Kaldis. London: Sage, 2013, pp. 364-368.

Publisher’s page

First paragraph of entry
Michel Foucault was a French philosopher and historian of ideas who was born in Poitiers in France in 1926 and died in Paris in 1984. Since his death his work has had a steadily increasing impact across the social sciences and humanities, generating new research methodologies, new areas of empirical interest, and a whole panoply of theoretical concepts. Foucault produced some 11 books during his lifetime and a collection of 364 of his shorter writings was published in 1994. From 1970 to 1984, in his capacity as Professor of Systems of Thought at the research institution the Collège de France, he also produced an annual series of lectures reporting on his research. These lectures have gradually appeared in print since 1997. This entry provides an overview of Foucault’s overall philosophy and methodology, looks at key concepts in his work and provides descriptions of his best known books.

Description of Encyclopedia

This Encyclopedia is the first of its kind in bringing together philosophy and the social sciences. It is not only about the philosophy of the social sciences but, going beyond that, it is also about the relationship between philosophy and the social sciences.

The subject of this Encyclopedia is purposefully multi- and inter-disciplinary. Knowledge boundaries are both delineated and crossed over. The goal is to convey a clear sense of how philosophy looks at the social sciences and to mark out a detailed picture of how the two are interrelated: interwoven at certain times but also differentiated and contrasted at others. The Entries cover topics of central significance but also those that are both controversial and on the cutting-edge, underlining the unique mark of this Encyclopedia: the interrelationship between philosophy and the social sciences, especially as it is found in fresh ideas and unprecedented hybrid disciplinary areas.

The Encyclopedia serves a further dual purpose: it contributes to the renewal of the philosophy of the social sciences and helps to promote novel modes of thinking about some of its classic problems.